Don't miss author Linda Lael Miller's next heartwarming holiday drama, Christmas in Painted Pony Creek , where a single mom and her daughter find their lives magically changed and filled with the love and kindness of a man who would do anything to protect them. "Miller tugs at the heartstrings as few authors can." -Publishers Weekly "Linda Lael Miller creates vibrant characters and stories I defy you to forget."-#1 New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber "Miller excels at creating extended-family dynamics in an authentic western small-town setting and richly populating her stories with animal as well as human characters."-Booklist on A Creed in Stone Creek "[Miller] is one of the finest American writers in the genre."-RT BookReviews Linda Lael Miller is a #1 New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author of more than one hundred novels. Long passionate about the Civil War buff, she has studied the era avidly and has made many visits to Gettysburg, where she has witnessed reenactments of the legendary clash between North and South. Linda explores that turbulent time in The Yankee Widow. Parable, Montana "You weren't at the funeral," Slade Barlow's half brother, Hutch Carmody, accused, the words rasping against the underside of a long, slow exhale. Slade didn't look at Hutch, though he could still see him out of the corner of one eye. The both of them were sitting side by side in a pair of uncomfortable chairs, facing what seemed like an acre of desk. Maggie Landers, their father's lawyer, who had summoned them there, had yet to put in an appearance. "I went to the graveside service," Slade replied evenly, and after a considerable length. It was the truth, though he'd stood at some distance from the crowd, not wanting to be numbered among the admitted mourners but unable to stay away entirely. "Why bother at all?" Hutch challenged. "Unless you just wanted to make sure the old man was really in the box?" Slade was not a quick-tempered man—by nature, he tended to think before he spoke and offer whatever response he might make with quiet deliberation, traits that had served him well over the several years since he'd been elected sheriff—but the edge in his half brother's tone brought heat surging up his neck to pound behind his ears. "Maybe that was it," he drawled with quiet contempt as the office door whispered open behind them. Hutch, who had just shoved back his chair as if to leap to his feet, ready to fight, thrust a hand hard through his shock of brownish-blond hair instead, probably to discharge that rush of adrenaline, and stayed put. He all but buzzed, like an electric fence line short-circuiting in a thunderstorm. Slade, though still confounded by his own invitation to this particular shindig, took a certain grim satisfaction in Hutch's reaction. There was, as the old saying went, no love lost between the two of them. "Good to see you haven't killed each other," Maggie observed brightly, rounding the shining expanse of the desk to take the leather chair behind it. Still gorgeous at fifty-plus, with short, expertly dyed brown hair and round green eyes, usually alight with mischievous intelligence, the lawyer turned slightly to boot up her computer. "Not just yet, anyhow," Hutch replied finally. Maggie's profile was all he could see of her, but Slade registered the slight smile that tilted up one corner of her mouth. Her fingers, perfectly manicured every Saturday morning at his mother's beauty shop for the last quarter of a century, flicked busily over the keyboard, and the monitor threw a wash of pale blue light onto her face and the lightweight jacket of her custom-made off-white pantsuit. "How's your mother, Slade?" she asked mildly without glancing his way. Maggie and his mom, Callie, were around the same age, and they'd been friends for as long as Slade could remember. Given that he'd run into Maggie at his mom's Curly-Burly Hair Salon just the day before, where she'd been having a trim and a touch-up, he figured the question was a rhetorical one, a sort of conversational filler. "She's fine," Slade said. By then, he'd gotten over the urge to commit fratricide and gone back to mulling the thing that had been bothering him ever since the formidable Ms. Landers had called him at home that morning and asked him to stop by her office on his way to work. The meeting had to be about the old man's last will and testament, though Maggie hadn't said so over the phone. All she'd been willing to give up was, "This won't take long, Slade, and believe me, it's in your best interests to be there." Hutch's presence made sense, since he was the legitimate son, the golden boy, groomed since birth to become the master of all he surveyed even as, motherless from the age of twelve, he ran wild. Slade himself, on the other hand, was the outsider—born on the proverbial wrong side of the blanket. John Carmody had never once acknowledged him, in all Slade's thirty-five years of life